Ensuring Access to Advanced Multiple Myeloma Treatments Amid Delivery Challenges: Ameet Patel, MD

In the final clip from last week’s Institute for Value-Based Medicine® event in Tampa, Florida, Ameet Patel, MD, of Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute, highlights the operational and financial challenges institutions may face when delivering targeted treatments, bispecifics, and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies to patients with multiple myeloma.

He concludes by sharing strategies for gaining payer approval and ensuring equitable access for all patients.

Watch parts 1 and 2 to learn more about these treatments and their optimal delivery methods.

This transcript was lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

What operational and financial challenges do institutions face when scaling advanced therapies, such as staffing or therapy costs?

Bispecific therapy, tackling the operational component, requires a dedicated team to be able to follow these patients. Education is key, so making sure that these patients also have the right support at home in the event that side effects do occur. It requires 24-hour support from providers to be able to carry patients safely through these kinds of therapies.

Thankfully, a lot of these patients who receive bispecific therapy tend to do pretty well with the right operational infrastructure, whereas in CAR T[-cell therapy], you require a more dedicated system by virtue of the acuity of side effects that may occur in the first 2 weeks of treatment.

While a lot of patients can initially be followed outpatient very closely daily, some individuals need to be in close proximity to a hospital setting to ensure that their symptoms can be very well managed. That requires a dedicated inpatient and outpatient team for collaboration purposes.

What strategies have proven effective for securing payer approval for these therapies, and how can institutions ensure equitable access for all patients?

When it comes to the payer component, I always recommend that it start with a discussion and education. What are the needs within the community, and how can we best help patients?

From a financial standpoint, it's important for both practices and institutions to decide if delivering this therapy is an area of high unmet need for their patients. Based on that agreement, it very well falls into place the opportunity to be able to operationalize and deliver these types of innovative therapies locally.

Now, on the comment about CAR T-cell therapy, this is a rapidly growing space, and what we're finding is that this is becoming increasingly deliverable within the community setting. That requires not only grounds for certification but also ongoing conversations with payers to ensure that proper quality standards are met and that the infrastructure can be invested in to be able to safely deliver these therapies.